Joe Moglia's Touchdowns In Football And Finance

In 1983, Joe Moglia was defensive coordinator for the Dartmouth football team.

With the Big Green coming off two straight Ivy League titles, Moglia was living a career dream.

But his personal life was in shambles. He was separated from his wife of 14 years and their four children. Economic circumstances forced him to live in a storage room above the coaches' offices.

Moglia oversaw TD Ameritrade's rise from the shock of 9/11, then joined Nebraska's staff on the way to taking over Coastal Carolina this year. AP View Enlarged Image

"I lived there for two years," Moglia, now 63, told IBD. "It had no heat, so I could see my breath in the winter."

Moglia saw he had to change his life plan, give up coaching and go in another direction: business.

It wasn't easy. He majored in economics in college and yearned for finance. But colleagues told him he needed a master's degree in business administration.

Moglia said nuts to that and ultimately joined Merrill Lynch, where he went on to win sales awards and top executive posts.

He subsequently became CEO of what is now TD Ameritrade (AMTD), where from 2001 to 2008 he expanded the company from $24 billion in assets to $300 billion and increased its market capitalization from $700 million to $12 billion.

Moglia's Keys

Has combined successful careers in finance and football coaching.

Overcame: Naysayers who said he'd never get a job in finance and doubters who questioned his return to coaching.

Lesson: Believe in yourself and seek your dream.

"Getting a job is not just sitting back and sending out resumes."

Then in that last year, at the height of his success, he decided to double back and revisit his coaching dreams — even if it meant taking an unpaid internship to prove how serious he was.

Brainy Brawn

Moglia was involved in football since childhood. At 5-foot-11, 190 pounds, he was a small guard on offense and light linebacker on defense at Fordham Prep in New York City. What he lacked in size and weight he made up for with smarts. He studied opponents and took advantage of their tendencies.

"If I saw, for example, a lineman would like to block me high, I'd use leverage to come under hard on his shoulder pads," he said. "If he tended to go low, I'd use my hands to push him down."

He declined several football scholarships and in 1967 enrolled at Fordham University, which did not have a football team at the time, in part so he could stay home and help at his father's fruit store.

But he wanted to stay involved in the game. So he approached the coach at his high school about becoming an assistant. At age 19, while a college sophomore, he joined the high school JV staff.

The following year he was promoted to offensive line and linebacker coach on the varsity.

In 1983, Joe Moglia was defensive coordinator for the Dartmouth football team.

With the Big Green coming off two straight Ivy League titles, Moglia was living a career dream.

But his personal life was in shambles. He was separated from his wife of 14 years and their four children. Economic circumstances forced him to live in a storage room above the coaches' offices.

Moglia oversaw TD Ameritrade's rise from the shock of 9/11, then joined Nebraska's staff on the way to taking over Coastal Carolina this year. AP View Enlarged Image

"I lived there for two years," Moglia, now 63, told IBD. "It had no heat, so I could see my breath in the winter."

Moglia saw he had to change his life plan, give up coaching and go in another direction: business.

It wasn't easy. He majored in economics in college and yearned for finance. But colleagues told him he needed a master's degree in business administration.

Moglia said nuts to that and ultimately joined Merrill Lynch, where he went on to win sales awards and top executive posts.

He subsequently became CEO of what is now TD Ameritrade (AMTD), where from 2001 to 2008 he expanded the company from $24 billion in assets to $300 billion and increased its market capitalization from $700 million to $12 billion.

Moglia's Keys

Has combined successful careers in finance and football coaching.

Overcame: Naysayers who said he'd never get a job in finance and doubters who questioned his return to coaching.

Lesson: Believe in yourself and seek your dream.

"Getting a job is not just sitting back and sending out resumes."

Then in that last year, at the height of his success, he decided to double back and revisit his coaching dreams — even if it meant taking an unpaid internship to prove how serious he was.

Brainy Brawn

Moglia was involved in football since childhood. At 5-foot-11, 190 pounds, he was a small guard on offense and light linebacker on defense at Fordham Prep in New York City. What he lacked in size and weight he made up for with smarts. He studied opponents and took advantage of their tendencies.

"If I saw, for example, a lineman would like to block me high, I'd use leverage to come under hard on his shoulder pads," he said. "If he tended to go low, I'd use my hands to push him down."

He declined several football scholarships and in 1967 enrolled at Fordham University, which did not have a football team at the time, in part so he could stay home and help at his father's fruit store.

But he wanted to stay involved in the game. So he approached the coach at his high school about becoming an assistant. At age 19, while a college sophomore, he joined the high school JV staff.

The following year he was promoted to offensive line and linebacker coach on the varsity.

By the time he graduated from Fordham in 1971, Moglia was convinced he'd found his calling.

Soon came high school head coaching jobs (1971-76) and assistant positions at Lafayette and Dartmouth (1977-83) before he decided he had to get into the world of business. But how to do that?

"You need to understand that going about getting a job is not just sitting back and sending out resumes to human resource people," he said. "It's networking. Going out to people in the field or who have connections in the field. Send a resume out blindly, and it will probably just end up in a pile with a bunch of others."

His game plan was simple. He got alumni books from colleges where he attended and coached. He looked for Wall Street types who had anything to do with the schools' football programs. He called all of them, and was well prepared when he did.

"I would give them a one-minute pitch and talk about my interest in Wall Street," he said.

He emphasized the leadership abilities he'd demonstrated as a coach. It was a well-rehearsed speech designed to lead to a face-to-face appointment with someone — the person he was speaking to or someone that person knew.

Moglia believed if he could meet a decision maker in person, he'd be able to sell himself, a belief rooted in self-confidence.

He finally landed an interview with the head of Merrill Lynch's fixed income department — and promised to become the company's "number one salesman."

Impressed by the chutzpah, the manager circumvented the HR department and placed Moglia in the MBA training program. From there, Moglia became a fixed-income salesman and applied the same attention to detail selling bonds as he did selling himself.

He was assigned some of the toughest accounts, so he put in long hours, identified key decision makers and came up with a pitch to convince them to use Merrill.

He landed more business with accounts such as T. Rowe Price and and Travelers Insurance, and became a top Merrill salesman.

The core of Moglia's philosophy was you had to differentiate yourself from the competition, discover the things you were good at and use them to your advantage.

In 2001 Moglia left the relatively secure life he'd built at Merrill to become CEO at Ameritrade, the small online broker that was going through a difficult period. He arranged for 85% of his salary to be in company stock.

Downturn, Then 9/11

When he officially got on board, he examined the company's "differences." On the plus side, there was a recognized quality brand that offered superior technology.

But in the midst of a serious bear market, there wasn't sufficient volume to turn a profit. His strategy was simple: Purchase other online traders. But because the company was in poor financial shape, execution was tough.

On Sept. 6, 2001, Ameritrade closed a deal for National Discount Brokers. Five days later the World Trade Center — and financial world — collapsed.

Moglia grasped two things.

First, what goes down must eventually come up.

Second, his strategy for Ameritrade would prove correct.

So rather than cut back, he kept buying: Datek Online the following April (making Ameritrade the largest online broker), several smaller companies from 2002 to 2005 and, in June 2005, TD Waterhouse.

The new company garnered record profit. But the idea of coaching continued to hover in Moglia's consciousness.

So in late 2008 Moglia decided to retire as CEO — he was named chairman — and give coaching another try. He was 59 and out of coaching more than two decades; his prospects of getting a job were about as great as when he sought work on Wall Street.

What to do? The same approach, reaching out to anyone connected to football. TD Ameritrade is based in Omaha, Neb., and one of the people he contacted was Tom Osborne, former football coach and the new athletic director at the University of Nebraska.

With The Huskers

"I knew of Joe," Osborne told IBD. "I didn't know him well. I think I met him one time. He called and said he wanted to have lunch. He told me he'd been in coaching 20 years before, that that was the time of his life that was most meaningful to him but had gone into business where he enjoyed considerable success.

"I said, 'Joe, you're a smart guy. Come down and be a guest coach, occasionally stand on the sideline and see what's going on.'"

Moglia doesn't do things occasionally. He turned the invite into a two-year unpaid internship at Nebraska, where he studied everything from playbooks to how athletes lined up for the national anthem.

"I didn't realize how serious he was," Osborne admitted. "He hardly missed a practice or a meeting. So I felt comfortable recommending him for a coaching job."

It was around this time that author Monte Burke heard about Moglia and thought it a fascinating story. He went to Nebraska, met him and wrote a biography, the just published "4th & Goal: One Man's Quest to Recapture His Dream."

What impressed Burke the most was Moglia's honesty.

"He was so open," said the author. "I've done hundreds of profiles, and I've never had a profilee be so open as he was. I followed him everywhere, and no question was out of bounds. No question was left unanswered."

With Osborne's recommendation, Moglia landed a head coaching job with the Omaha Nighthawks of the United Football League in 2011.

But what he really wanted was to work with "18- to 22-year-olds, helping a boy become a man," Moglia said. "There's something emotionally fulfilling about that, and I was always interested in going back to coach college ball."

This year he got his wish. He took over the Chanticleers of Coastal Carolina University in Conway, S.C., where he has them off to a 2-0 start — not bad for a financial guy.

See Also

The stock brokerage and investment bank industry group is rich with stocks carrying solid profit margins. Five stock brokerage stocks posted quarterly after-tax margins of 15% or higher in recent quarters. Two of them — Schwab and Ameritrade — are among the top five stockbrokers in ...

Special Report: Best Online Brokers 2015 Chief Technology Officer Lou Steinberg is devoted to ensuring that TD Ameritrade, one of the top five online stockbrokers in IBD's third annual survey, doesn't become easy prey. His cybersecurity team constantly examines ways to make it too hard and costly ...

Special Report: Best Online Brokers 2015 Get ready for the next big thing in mobile investing. Watch for the watch, the Apple Watch, that is, and its Android imitators. Soon you'll be able to check the stock price of Alibaba or buy that GoPro breakout with a turn of the wrist. Just like you're ...

Special Report: Best Online Brokers 2015 Most ETF investors worry about stock market turmoil and uncertainty. But as the best online stock brokers know, others live for volatility. Of a certain kind. "Our customers like to trade products that are volatile and have great liquidity," said Salomon ...

01/23/2015 07:09 PM ET

More Leaders & Success Articles:

As an actress, Jessica Alba is used to getting feedback. But in 2008, the biggest reaction she caught was an allergic one — from laundry detergent. The twist couldn't have come at a worse time, as Alba was pregnant with her first daughter. Having suffered multiple maladies during her own ...

Prevent meetings from turning into ineffective black holes where nothing is accomplished. If you fix those gatherings, the result can be clarity and progress. That's from Paul Axtell, author of "Meetings Matter." Tips on making meetings more than worth the effort:  Get it. Maximize every ...

As motivators go, many will say that there's fear and there's greed. Probably the stronger of them is fear. It's with us much of the time, because change — and the uncertainty that comes with it and causes fear — is always with us. "There's no such thing as a comfortable change," said ...

Baseball is the only game where the defense has the ball. The offense has slim chances, really — just .42 second to take control as the ball crosses the plate. Even less time if the pitcher has a decent fastball. Deep inside that blink, Boston Red Sox star Ted Williams created such power, ...

When Julian Fellowes was growing up, his father gave him what proved sound advice: "If you have the misfortune to be born into a generation which must earn a living, you might as well do something amusing." Fellowes took the advice to heart. After making it as a character actor, he turned to ...

Select market data is provided by Interactive Data Corp. Real Time Services. Price and Volume data is delayed 20 minutes unless otherwise noted, is believed accurate but is not warranted or guaranteed by Interactive Data Corp. Real Time Services and is subject to Interactive Data Corp. Real Time Services terms. All times are Eastern United States. *Reflects real-time index prices.